The Search for Philip K. Dick

by Dick, Anne R.

  Search for Philip K. Dick was the first biography of him to be completed. The manuscript revealed a side of Phil that some of his friends and followers couldn’t accept. Besides loving Phil, some of them had also been well primed by Phil to believe a version of his life in which I had no credibility (to put it mildly), even though at the same time he was telling them he was being watched by the KGB, the FBI, and the CIA. (Some of them believed that, too.) One of them, a dear young man, fiercely loyal to his late friend, threatened to sue me after he read my manuscript. A group of his young male followers supported his other biographers, all male, heartily. It’s interesting to me that the women who read my manuscript understood it immediately, but some men took a little longer.

  I discovered many new aspects of Phil’s writing that I hadn’t perceived when, as his first reader during his Point Reyes period, I proofread his novels. My goodness, the anti-heroines of the Point Reyes novels, more or less based on me, were always murderesses, adulteresses, and sometimes schizophrenic. In the books written at the end of our marriage, they also became drug addicts. I don’t even take aspirin. Then there were the books with a theme of divorce and reconciliation, written while we were separating. I hadn’t read these until after Phil’s death. If I had read them in 1965, would our lives have turned out differently? We had to have bought the white Jaguar before Phil wrote We Can Build You, because that car was in the book. The ad in the Baywood Press that inspired us to buy a spinet piano was in that book also. We Can Build You told about our family’s trip to Disneyland and Phil’s fascination with the Lincoln robot there.

  My children, now grown, were a great help in dating events: “That happened the year I was in third grade.” “That was the month I fell and chipped my tooth.” “That happened right after my birthday party, the one where the cake had yellow icing and seven white candles.”

  When I learned about the later part of Phil’s life, I felt sad. I worried about chronicling it, even though Phil left similar information for biographers in his letters and other documents. At times, I felt that something must be terribly wrong with me that I had loved a person who was (to my way of thinking) involved in such a terrible life at one period. But he had also been my best friend as well as a good husband—he played the role beautifully for a while—and a good father to my children. He was lots of fun, too. And he was a writer. I was a lifelong reader. I love writers.

  Besides his books, there was the immense amount of material that had been written about him. His life and writing existed on so many levels that I couldn’t possibly cover what one critic called “the vast reality of Philip K. Dick.” I have made no attempt to consider literary, political, sociological, or theological ideas. Phil’s voluminous letters are a huge research project in themselves. Besides thirty-six science fiction novels and 120 short stories, Phil left nine unpublished literary manuscripts and a one-million-word theological rumination, The Exegesis. When I was writing this book in 1984, at least seven other books were being written about Phil. He’s been compared to Kafka, Dickens, Borges, and Blake. Blake? I was astonished. I hadn’t followed Phil’s career after our divorce (in fact I had ignored it) and was unaware of his great success.

  Writing this book was like living with Phil again. I never met anyone else like this kind, charming, brilliant, modest, responsive man, a life enhancer, a joy to be around—but there was something else, something dark. There was a real Phil, but which one was it? When I think I know, that’s just when I lose the image. Did Phil change identities the way some people change their clothes?

  He was isolated by his genius. No one, except years later Gregg Rickman (Phil’s chosen biographer, who was literally—and literarily—persecuted for his theory) saw how hard Phil had tried and how much he had to struggle with. It is amazing that Phil was able to produce so much excellent, innovative writing with his inner problems, whatever they were. He used those problems to write his novels!

  If Phil were alive he would have loved my project and encouraged me. He would have invented all sorts of theories to support my picture of his life. Then he would have invented other theories just as plausible. Bending a few facts here and there, he would have rewoven the past to present a reality that would make him look better and better and me worse and worse, but the pyrotechnics of his mind would have been so remarkable that I couldn’t have helped but admire them. My advice to anyone married to a person like Phil (but there couldn’t be another!) is if there is no other solution, write a book.

  PART I: 1958-64

  As I wrote this book, I became so immersed in the past that when I took a walk in the field, I was in the eternal now of 1958, the black-faced sheep just over the rise by the eucalyptus trees, and Phil and our four small girls back in the house making fudge. As I worked, I dreamed vivid dreams, more real than everyday life. My memories carried me to that timeless place where feelings never change.

  One

  I MEET PHIL DICK

  Then she appeared, gliding at him with her springing, padding walk, meanwhile drying her hands on a dishtowel…. [S]he wore tight pants and sandals, and her hair was uncombed. God, how pretty she looks, he thought. That marvelous alert walk of hers … ready to whip around in the opposite direction. Always conscious of the ground under her.

  —Philip K. Dick, Confessions of a Crap Artist

  THE DAY I met Philip K. Dick in late October 1958, my third daughter Tandy, not old enough for school yet, and I went downtown after lunch to shop at the Palace Market in Point Reyes Station. (Its motto: “Shop at the Palace, live like a king.” “And pay like an emperor,” Phil added later.) We ran into my friend Avis Hall while buying brownies at the Bluebird’s cake sale. She wanted to give me her condolences, but I didn’t want any more sympathy and changed the subject. We got to talking about this and that, and she told me that a writer and his wife had just moved into the white frame bungalow on the corner of Manana and Lorraine.

  “What kind of a writer?” I asked, thinking that it was probably someone who wrote technical manuals. She didn’t know, but she said that the new couple had come from Berkeley.

  When we got back home, I put Tandy down for a nap and worked in the vegetable garden while worrying about the future. Then I started worrying about the past and about Richard’s tragic death. No. I didn’t want to think about that. I began to feel depressed. I wrenched my thoughts around toward the new couple. “Maybe they’ll turn out to be interesting,” I thought and decided to call on them in the late afternoon. My oldest daughter Hatte could babysit with her sisters Jayne and Tandy.

  At five o’clock, the cocktail hour, I called the children. “Hurry, girls, get your Mickey Mouse hats,” and switched on the TV. The Mouseketeers were already singing “M … I … C … K….” I put our blue merle collie, Drift, out on the patio and ran into the bedroom to slip on a three-quarter-length red dirndl skirt with white fringe around the bottom, handmade leather sandals, and handmade spiral brass earrings. I walked past the Monterey cypress trees in our driveway, jumped in my middle-aged Ford Country Squire station wagon, and drove down the hill, turning up Lorraine Street just before Forester’s Hall. As I parked near the new writer’s house at 73 Lorraine, the late-afternoon fog was blowing through the eucalyptus trees, and a blue heron flew over on the way to its inland nest. I tried to open the gate of the white picket fence but the latch was too stiff, so I hiked up my skirt and climbed over. Passing a bed of bearded iris and old-fashioned floribunda roses in the front yard, I ran up the porch steps and knocked on the front door.

  At that time I was a thirty-year-old widow. My husband, poet Richard Rubenstein, had died suddenly only three weeks before. Three years earlier we had bought a somewhat California Bauhaus house in Point Reyes Station, California—unusual architecture for the rural area of West Marin. It was in a five-acre field, and a small flock of Suffolk sheep had come with the house. Old-timers told us that the house was sitting on an arm of the San Andreas fault, the longest and most dangerous earthquake fault i
n the world.

  Point Reyes Station is a small agricultural town on the California coast, one hour’s drive north of the Golden Gate Bridge. It has one main street that in those days had only a few stores on it. A couple dozen houses were clustered around this “downtown” area, and on a nearby hill there were another few dozen houses. Beyond were very large ranches.

  A half-mile west below a bluff is long, narrow Tomales Bay. To the east are large rolling hills, golden in late summer and fall, green in winter and spring, and always dotted with black and white cows. On a clear day I could see toward the west Inverness Ridge, covered with a forest of fir, oak, and bay trees. Its far side sloped down to the Pacific Ocean and miles of beaches. Point Reyes, twenty miles north, juts out into the Pacific Ocean and is the windiest and most western spot of the continental United States. It was named after los tres reyes by Spanish explorers when it was been first sighted on January 6, 1606, the day of epiphany.

  Many of the people who lived then in West Marin, which includes Point Reyes Station, Inverness, Olema, Marshall, and Tomales, worked on dairy ranches. Another group worked for RCA ship-to-shore communications. College professors and old Bay Area families owned rustic summer cottages in Inverness.

  My driver’s license read: “Blonde hair, blue eyes, 5’4”, 120 pounds, must wear glasses.” I dressed in a colorful and avant-garde way in those days. I had three beautiful daughters: two blue-eyed blondes, Hatte, eight, and Tandy, three; and Jayne, six, with bronze hair and hazel eyes. Jayne was in first grade, Hatte third, and Tandy was still at home. I was glad I had her company while I went through the motions of cooking, cleaning house, and gardening, wondering all the time what to do with our lives after the loss of their father and my husband, Richard Rubenstein.

  At 73 Lorraine Street, a young woman with short, curly black hair and wearing jeans answered the door. “Hi,” I said, “I heard a writer and his wife moved here. Welcome to Point Reyes. My name is Anne Rubenstein. I live up the road. My late husband, Richard Rubenstein, was a writer too, a poet.”

  Kleo Dick was pleased that I had come by to welcome her and her husband to our town. She introduced herself and invited me to “Come in and meet Phil.” As she led me through the house to the kitchen I noticed that there was hardly any furniture and what there was must have come from a sale at a Salvation Army store.

  I still have in my mind a vivid picture of Phil standing with his hands in his back jean pockets, rocking on his heels, frowning slightly and staring at the floor. He was twenty-nine years old, just under six feet tall, and on the slender side. He had dark hair above a high forehead and intense gray-green eyes. An almost-handsome man, he wore an old brown leather jacket with knitted cuffs and knitted waist, a cheap plaid flannel shirt, stiff jeans, and clunky, brown Army boots. Nevertheless, he managed to look graceful and attractive—like someone wearing a disguise.

  Kleo introduced him: “Meet Philip K. Dick.” He looked up at me as we came in, and I looked up into his eyes, and, as I was beginning to say, “How nice to meet you,” I had an odd experience unlike anything that had ever happened to me before. A voice from the depths of my mind said, “I already know this person. I’ve known him for eons.” But my practical conscious mind, astonished, answered itself, “Ridiculous, how can that be? You just met him.”

  “What does the ‘K’ stand for?” I asked him.

  “Kindred,” he answered.

  “Aha!” said that voice.

  I considered myself to be a logical person not given to silly mysticism and brushed this whole experience out of my mind. The three of us sat down at the kitchen table and immediately plunged into an animated conversation. Phil had a most pleasant manner and a beautiful voice. He almost fell backward in his tilted chair when he heard that my late husband and I had been connected with the little magazine Neurotica, and that we knew William Inge, James Jones, and other poets and writers whose names I dropped with great abandon. I told him that I had edited, published, and distributed four issues of two little poetry magazines, Inferno and Gryphon, and a small chapbook of Richard’s poems, Beer and Angels.

  I told Kleo and Phil about Richard’s sudden death on Yom Kippur three weeks earlier at the Yale Psychiatric Institute. He had dropped dead while getting a drink of water from the water fountain. After a long investigation, it was discovered that he had been fatally allergic to the heavy tranquilizers given to him, drugs that were still so new that their side effects were not yet known. Also, some doctors don’t seem to know this, but many sensitive, creative, high-strung people react differently to pharmaceutical medicines. Maybe we’ve already killed many of them off.

  But I didn’t want to go over that tragedy again. I changed the subject and asked Phil about his writing. He said he was a science fiction writer. Interesting. I had never met this type of writer before. As we talked, I realized that I had actually read one of his stories in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. He was quite pleased, although he seemed more interested in telling me about his literary novels, as yet unpublished. “I am only a minor science fiction writer,” he said.

  Later, I found he had already written and published eighty-five short stories and five science fiction novels—Solar Lottery, The World Jones Made, The Man Who Japed, Eye in the Sky, The Cosmic Puppets—and he was finishing Time Out of Joint, but in those days science fiction was in a literary ghetto and Phil was embarrassed that he wrote it. He was struggling to be a “mainstream” success by writing literary novels, most of which wouldn’t be published until after his death.

  I told Phil and Kleo that Richard, the girls, and I had moved to Point Reyes Station in 1955 to get away from the city. We wanted to own some land where we could raise plants and animals, and Richard wanted to devote his time to his poetry. He had never had a job; he was too nervous, and luckily his family had the wherewithal to support him.

  Phil and Kleo told me that they had wanted to get back to the land and garden and raise animals too. To supplement their income, Kleo was commuting to Berkeley three days a week to work in the administrative offices of the University of California.

  Phil described their house and the area in a letter to a friend: “… [W]e … bought a house in a small dairy-farming town up in North West Marin County called Point Reyes Station—it’s on State Route One. We have a plot of land 100 × 160, and we’re raising two ducks and one tomcat. The area is full of wildlife—deer, rabbits, almost three hundred species of wild birds—more than any other place in California. Including flocks of wild swan. Deer come right into our yard. All the men wear genuine Western hats and boots—they work on the nearby ranches.”

  I checked my watch. “Oh, dear, I have to get back to the girls,” I said. “I wish we could go on talking. Can you come over tomorrow? I have some books you’d be interested in. You’ll like the sheep, and our collie dog, Drift.”

  “Oh yes, we’d love to,” said Kleo.

  As I left, Phil insisted on loaning me some books: Franz Kafka’s The Castle, Herman Hesse’s Siddartha, and James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. On the drive home I thought happily that the new couple had exceeded my expectations. I had stopped feeling miserable and was looking forward to tomorrow.

  The next afternoon I showed Phil and Kleo around my house. Richard and I had furnished it with a combination of antique and modern pieces, Eames chairs, a Noguchi lamp, an antique New England pine table, Navaho rugs—that sort of thing. A clay sculpture I was working on was on the dining room table. The children and I had been eating buffet style in the living room while I worked on it.

  “I’ll bet this place costs a fortune to heat,” Phil said, looking at the forty-five feet of floor-to-ceiling windows that ran the length of the house’s southeast side. He thought that perhaps the welded steel fireplace in the center of the living area might help with the heating expense.

  “It has resistance electrical wire in the floor,” I told him. “We bought this house for $16,000, nothing down, $101 a month, on a 4 1
/2 percent GI loan.” We looked at the black-faced sheep in the field and at the large, rounded green hills across the valley. A flock of quail flew up. “There are dozens of meadowlarks around, and last night a fox walked by the corner of the living room.”

  Phil and Kleo browsed in Richard’s collection of modern poetry. “Can I borrow this?” said Phil as he picked up a copy of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, which a friend of Richard’s had smuggled into the United States. It was illegal in the United States under the censorship laws of the time. Phil and Kleo stayed for dinner, and afterward we played games with the children. When the children went to bed, we talked and talked.

  Phil said that he and Kleo had been invited by their neighbors, June and Jerry Kresy, to a “flying saucer group that met at ‘Claudia Hambro’s’ house in Inverness.” (Claudia Hambro was Phil’s fictional name for this real woman in Confessions of a Crap Artist.) I had already heard about this group. It first met to talk about philosophy, but soon these otherwise sensible people came to believe Claudia’s ideas about flying saucers. Claudia told them that soon the world was going to come to an end, but she was in touch with beings from outer space who were going to save a select number of people, among them, her group. When the last days came, her house would turn into a flying saucer. This would happen early next year on April 22, 1959.

  Claudia told Phil that she perceived that he was from somewhere else. “In some way,” she told him, “you will help the poor lost people from Earth when the last days come.”

  Phil wrote about Claudia in Confessions of a Crap Artist:

  [She] was quite small, with a huge black pony tall of such heavy hair that I thought she must be a foreigner. Her face had a dark quality, like an Italian’s, but her nose had the bony prominence of an American Indian’s. She had quite a strong chin and large brown eyes that stared at me so hard and fixedly that I became nervous. After saying hello she said nothing at all but smiled. She had sharp teeth, like a savage’s, and that also made me uneasy. She wore a green shirt, like a man’s, out at the waist, and shorts, and gold sandals…. [I]n some respects [she] seemed breathtakingly beautiful, but at the same time I was aware that something was wrong with her proportions. Her head was slightly too large for her shoulders—although it may have been an illusion due to her heavy black hair—and her chest was somewhat concave, actually hollow, not like a woman’s chest at all. And her hips were too small in proportion to her shoulders and then, in order, her legs were too short for her hips, and her feet too small for her legs. So she resembled an inverted pyramid. Her voice had a rasping, husky quality, low-pitched. Like her eyes it had a strong and intense authority to it, and I found myself unable to break away from her gaze. Although she had never seen me before—laid eyes on me, as they say—she acted as if she had expected to see me, as if I was familiar to her.